Google Shoot View was the brainchild of Dutch advertising agency Pool Worldwide, and it allowed you to virtually fire an M4 machine gun superimposed over any of Google Street View’s maps. The past two sentences have been written in the past tense, because Google has shut down Google Shoot View.
According to a post on Pool Worldwide’s Twitter account, the game is no more as “Google has killed the API so at the mo we can’t run shoot view.” If you never got a chance to play with Shoot View, the video for the game should give you a general idea what it is about.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7iavBVfuvoc#!’]
Basically, calling Google Shoot View a game was being generous with the term game, as there was no risk/reward, test of skill, or anything other than a machine gun superimposed over a Street View shot that would go through a firing animation when the mouse button was clicked on. You could fire at people who happened to be on the street when a Street View car rolled past, but you could not actually shoot them, no more than you could if you brought up a Street View map now, turned your hand into a finger gun and dropped your thumb a few times.
Either way, Google apparently found it creepy enough to pull the API over a terms of service violation. Censorship, sure, but face it, the game was kind of creepy. So, now you can’t unnerve your fellow employees by shooting up the area outside your office, short of actually doing so.
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